Tuesday, October 14, 2014

About animal-rights and progressive politics

Is the discourse about ‘animal rights’ a progressive argumentation for the not eating meat? Animal rights have since a long time been linked to the leftwing and progressive social movements. Animal rights activists are historically  linked to hippie movements, anarchist movements and “green” political organizations. Animal rights have played a key element in the discourse about vegetarianism. But is this link legitimate from a progressive perspective?

The animal rights movements is a typical post-modern movement which as a political movement only emerged in the 1970’s, when the social balance between classes enabled political issues to emerge “beyond” the traditional social conflict. The main problem here is that it detached these struggles from the social class struggle at the core of the capitalist world system – becoming “identity-based”- struggles, ideologically transposing the material social conflict. This “depolitization”, enabled it to become legitimate all over the political spectrum in times of neoliberal hegemony.

The animal rights narrative is a continuation of the “human rights” discourse projected upon non-human beings. This brings two profound axis of critique to animal rights ideology; one is the traditional critique against the Liberal, idealist, paternalistic, colonial… etc core of the idea of human rights. The other one is the problem of humanization of non-human beings – many times combined with dehumanization of human beings and social customs.

The animal rights narrative humanizes animals by attributing those “human characteristics”, so that the subject of ideology self-identifies with the animal or identifies the animal as its peer. Animals are given human character with human emotions and values; the animal is portrayed as a victim supposed to be saved based upon emotions of suffering, creating a parallel with human suffering. As such, this humanization only exists because of the practice by humans attributing those characteristics, “Animal rights” thus only exist as part of a human social construction, not because of the existence of the animal as such, and could therefore be considered as a form of fetish. No harm so far, were it not that with the inclusion of animals within the “human sphere” it excludes very human practices outside that sphere. Typically the discourse defending animal rights, dehumanizes practices that violate those “rights”. Cultures, traditions or practices that cause animal suffering, such as sacrifice, ritual slaughter, hunt, industrial slaughter, and industrial meat production are portrayed as “inhumane”, perpetrators are barbarians, uncivilized, live in the past or are even considered as “beasts”.

It is therefore not very surprising the since a few years the animal rights narrative has been adopted by extreme right and nationalist movements. It happened particularly in the question of addressing Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughters. Last month, 10.000 people gathered in Brussels in a demonstration organized by Gaia on the day of sacrifice at the end of the Ramadan, joining human rights activists under islamophobic slogans. At the same time various neo-nazi groups adopted an “ecological” discourse, defending the conservation “autochthonous” environment and the exclusion of alien elements.

From my perspective, the only way that the left can respond to these issues is through the uncompromising defense of a humanist and anthropocentric approach, considering the struggle for equal rights among humans as the main objective… Such approach which can never defend animal rights as such against human customs, but considers “animal rights” as one among others human beliefs – the logic here is exactly the same as Marx’s logic behind commodity-fetishism: The value attributed to animals and between animals is nothing else than a fetish derived from social relations between humans and should be approached like that…

This logic fits very well in the idea of Jason Moore about today’s capitalist society as a world-socio-ecology, which probably also enables to bring forward a much more progressive approach towards arguments for the protection of the human environment and even for veganism. The basic idea is that issues are problematized within the capitalist world-ecology on the basis of unequal harms they provoke upon society. The impact of the meat-industry can therefore be criticized the impact of it on climate change and in particular its unequal social impact. Climate change primarily affects poorer layers of society, peripheral areas of the world system; the destruction of livelihoods of indigenous peoples, the impact upon health of poor classes that cannot pay healthcare, poor countries that cannot protect themselves of floods, etc. Such approach also enables to have a “political subject” which can struggle for those rights, as a form of emancipation from its own material conditions – animals cannot.